Fake news, anyone?

If you thought the mainstream media’s malpractice toward Donald Trump couldn’t have been any worse, the elitist hacks at The Washington Post would like you to hold their chardonnays. Decency, it seems, also Dies in Darkness.

As Fox News reports, “The Washington Post made a massive correction Monday to a January report about a phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Georgia elections investigator Frances Watson, admitting it wrongly attributed multiple quotes to Trump based on an anonymous source.”

Here’s the Post’s “correction,” which has been tacked atop the original story.

How does a paper stay in business when it admits to having “wrongly attributed multiple quotes” to a sitting U.S. president? This wasn’t some anonymous bureaucrat weighing in on an obscure policy matter; this was The World’s Most Important Man, and this was one of the world’s most influential newspapers making up, er, stuff about him.

“The Post,” Fox News continues, “initially reported Trump had told an official working in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office to ‘find the fraud’ in the state, which he lost narrowly to Joe Biden, and that she would be a ‘national hero’ if she did.”

But a newly emerged recording proves the former president never said any such thing. Instead, Trump said that Georgia elections investigator Frances Watson would be “praised” when the “right answer comes out,” and he encouraged her to closely examine mail-in ballots in Atlanta’s deep-blue Fulton County. It’s all right here for any journalist with integrity to listen to and then accurately transcribe:

But, no, according to the Post and every other news outlet that lazily picked it up, Trump said, “Find the fraud.” And we heard it over and over and over again. Remember?

As for collateral damage, there’s plenty of it. And not just because so many other outlets gullibly (or perhaps wishfully) aired the slop served up to them by the Post.

As Washington Examiner columnist Becket Adams points out, “It’s one thing if a single news outlet publishes a fraudulent anonymously sourced ‘scoop.’ It’s another thing entirely if multiple newsrooms claim they independently ‘confirmed’ the fraudulent ‘scoop’ with anonymous sources of their own. The former can reasonably be explained away as a simple error; the latter is not so simple. It’s unrealistic so many sources would be wrong about the same thing.”

But they were. NBC News, USA Today, ABC News, PBS News Hour, and CNN all claimed that they independently confirmed the original story with anonymous sources of their own — which means that all five confirmed that Donald Trump said things he never actually said.

How did it happen? As Matt Margolis at PJ Media reports, “The fact that the recording of the call was found in the trash folder of a Georgia state official’s computer seems to suggest that one or more Georgia state officials conspired to come up with a damaging version of the phone call, leaked the phony details to the media, and then covered up evidence of the actual call.”

Donald Trump, for his part, must be enjoying his retirement, because he appears to be taking the news pretty well.

“While I appreciate the Washington Post’s correction, which immediately makes the Georgia Witch Hunt a non-story, the original story was a Hoax, right from the very beginning,” he said in a statement sent by his Save America PAC. The rest of it is here. Donald Trump may not always be right, but he’s always been right about fake news.